6 Genre-Tripping Gunfighters Jonah Hex Must Duel FTW!

Image courtesy DC Comics

DC Comics’ multiversal gunfighter Jonah Hex is multitasking with Megan Fox in a theater near you starting Friday. And the scarred antihero bared his burnt roots earlier this month in DC’s back-story comic, Jonah Hex: No Way Back.

The pop-culture re-emergence of the supernatural gunslinger raises a question: Could the hardy Jonah Hex, created by writer John Albano and artist Tony DeZuniga in the early ’70s, survive a new-millennium shootout with his genre-tripping, gun-toting peers and predecessors? Saddle up and find out.

Clint Eastwood’s The Man With No Name

He was a bigger badass than Eastwood’s more-recent crime-fighting vigilante, although that .44 Magnum-toting cop made an indelible imprint on one of the scribes behind Jonah Hex: No Way Back.

“Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry movies were my Star Wars when I was younger,” Jimmy Palmiotti told Wired.com in an e-mail. “And I used to pick up the Jonah Hex titles before the superheroes.”

No disrespect to Hex, but a shootout with Dirty Harry would be more dangerous for The Man With No Name than a face-off with the surly star of Palmiotti and co-writer Justin Gray’s continuing series for DC Comics. Hex can surely dish out what Palmiotti calls “harsh justice,” but few shooters can survive a duel with Eastwood’s wandering star.

Advantage: Man With No Name.

Star Wars‘ Han Solo

Of course, that depends on what version of Star Wars you’re watching. But don’t worry, Greedo, you’ve got great company. You’re lying there next to countless stormtroopers, Jabba the Hutt fodder and other characters who couldn’t match up to Han Solo.

Jonah Hex may have predated Harrison Ford’s interstellar gunfighter by half a decade, but he stands no chance against the space-faring blaster-slinger’s cultural power. After all, the line from The Man With No Name runs right through the Star Wars franchise‘s coolest character, all the way to the rest of the fictional gunslingers on this list.

Advantage: Solo.

Cowboy Bebop‘s Spike Spiegel

Anime and manga fans, and others with intriguing tastes, might kick this smartass bounty hunter all the way up to the front of the line waiting to battle Hex. And a showdown with Cowboy Bebop‘s Spike Spiegel wouldn’t just be about guns: He’s as handy with his mouth and fists as he is with a Jericho 941 or an Asteroid racer tricked out with plasma cannons and chain guns.

Just check out this YouTube mashup of Cowboy Bebop, conveniently soundtracked to Gorillaz’s rap-pop anthem “Clint Eastwood.” Spike can pretty much do it all. But he does have a prevailing weakness, as Cowboy Bebop proved, that Hex doesn’t: a heart.

Advantage: Hex. For now.

Firefly‘s Capt. Malcolm Reynolds

Firefly‘s Malcolm Reynolds, captain of the good ship Serenity, hopped on the coattails of Han Solo and Eastwood’s Man With No Name to amass pop-culture fame that puts that unhinged jerk Jack Bauer to shame. (Seriously, is Bauer’s 24 hours of fame up yet?)

Screen the YouTube fan mashup at right — which smashes Nathan Fillion’s Reynolds into Rage Against the Machine’s cover of Cypress Hill’s “How I Can Just Kill a Man” — for remixed snippets of the gun-slinging Firefly captain in action. It’s a kinetic throwback.

How would Hex fare against Reynolds? Well, you’re likely to get two different answers: One from the Firefly fans and another from everyone else. But an objective analysis would take into account that Jonah Hex is riding a Hollywood blockbuster (and Megan Fox), while Fillion has been propping up ABC mystery Castle.

Advantage: Hex.

Dead Man‘s William Blake

Still the most powerful postmodern Western ever, Jim Jarmusch’s 1995 Dead Man married arresting visuals, acidic humor, all-star cameos and Neil Young’s incendiary guitar in ways that have yet to be matched.

That has much to do with its source materials: Johnny Depp’s accidental outlaw William Blake is named for the arts visionary of the same name, and even reads some of the real William Blake‘s apocalyptic poetry in the poetic video for Young’s Dead Man theme above. Heavyweight talents like Robert Mitchum, Lance Henriksen, John Hurt, Iggy Pop, Gary Farmer, Michael Wincott and Gabriel Byrne bring surreal characters to life in the movie, which is a psychedelic mind-fry masquerading as a shooter.

Josh Brolin, who plays the lead in the Jonah Hex movie, is a conscientious, committed actor, but he’s mostly on his own in the comics-fueled film. Depp had deep backup in Dead Man, as well as a curious habit of firing off lucky shots. His ghostly character floated from trope to trope, undressing Western revisionism the entire way. One gets the feeling that Brolin will trip up on those tropes in Jonah Hex.

Advantage: William Blake.

Westworld‘s Gunslinger

Postmodern Westerns like Cowboy Bebop, Dead Man and Firefly are amazing when they work.

It’s when the glitches take over that things fall apart, as they did in 1973 sci-fi cult classic Westworld. We get a kick out of this compressed Westworld video operating on null-zero-void‘s glitchy IDM soundtrack. It’s as fun to watch as the film itself.

But it’s not threatening or fearsome in the slightest, unlike Jonah Hex. Let’s be honest: Yul Brynner’s theme-park Gunslinger robot had a hard enough time (spoiler alert!) chasing down, and then losing to, a skinny, hilariously mustachioed Richard Benjamin in Westworld. He’d stand zero chance against anyone on this list, including Hex.

But Westworld‘s proto-Terminator has been cited or lampooned by everything from The Simpsons and Red Dwarf to the band Muse and the killer game Portal. Eat that, meatsacks.